Note - I write a column for the Shelbyville, Kentucky newspaper, the Sentinel-News, every other Friday. On June 3rd, the Sentinel began publication of a series of columns about belief and unbelief, written by myself and a member of our community, who is an atheist. I thought it would be an interesting conversation and I appreciate the Sentinel-News and my co-author for participating. For the privacy of the other person I am not including their name in the columns as I publish them each week on this site. Even though the person has publicly agreed to have them published in the Sentinel-News, I am not assuming they want their columns or name published on this site.
I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun
has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else –
C. S. Lewis
Why do people
believe what they believe? The
answer to that question is not as simple as one might think.
I included the
quote by C. S. Lewis at the top of this column because his words are more than
a declaration of his foundational belief about life; they bear testimony to the
fact that every person has a lens through which they view the world and
everything that happens in life. That lens is a powerful force that shapes and
determines the manner in which we come to understand and perceive the nature of
reality itself.
It is the
understanding that we all see the world through a particular lens that we must
use as a starting point in the conversation about belief. This lens, through
which we view all things, comes to us through our environment and our
experiences. I understand and view life in a particular way, for instance, because
of the time period and part of the country in which I was raised. Coming of age
in the 60s and 70s, when there was a greater sense of hope and optimism in our
country, was a factor in bringing me to see the world through a more positive
and optimistic lens. Those who come of age in our present world context,
presumably, might be more likely to have a pessimistic view of life and the
world. The point is, all of us have many influences and experiences that shape
the lens of our lives and that lens comes to us early in life and generally without
our awareness.
As we age, and
move into greater self-awareness, we also become more aware of the lens through
which we see life, and we sometimes make a more conscious decision to alter
that lens, and this is what I would call the action of choosing a narrative by
which we live. A narrative is different from a lens. A lens comes to us by our
environment, our social and historical context, our experiences, and many other
factors, making it more of an unconscious state of being. A narrative, in
contrast, is a way of looking at life that is very much a conscious decision. A
lens, in contrast to a narrative, would be the faith that we inherit from our
family, while a narrative is the choice we make at some point in life about
what we will do with that faith, such as whether we continue to accept it as
is, adapt it, or reject it.
This leads us to
what is, in my opinion, one of the great fallacies of atheism, which is that
one becomes somehow – almost magically – more objective and rational when one
chooses the narrative of disbelief, as contrasted to the perceived
unobjectivity and irrationality of belief. Changing the narrative by which we
live, such as from belief to unbelief, does not make one more objective; it simply
provides a different lens through which we see the world. Unbelief, however
much it might claim, does not necessarily make one more rational; it simply
replaces one lens with another, so that one then sees life and the world
through a different set of assumptions and suppositions.
It is for this
reason that I would reject the idea that anyone is a so-called free thinker, a term often favored by
those operating out of the narrative of unbelief. Because we are all shaped by
environment and experiences, it is simply not possible that anyone is able to
think freely of their influences. The truth is that even when one changes the
narrative by which he lives his life it means he is merely trading one
intellectual framework for another; there is no inherent guarantee of objectivity
or freedom from intellectual bias. Coming to this realization allows us to
understand how one particular point of view might seem so perfectly reasonable,
obvious, and true to one person and yet totally unreasonable, unclear, and
false to someone else. Free-thinking, then, is an oxymoron, as every belief
occurs within a context, and our own beliefs are shaped and molded in ways of
which we are unaware. My faith may
be an integral part of my life because that was the way I was raised, and the
same can be said of unbelief.
Do I believe in
God because I made a totally rational choice? Not really. Does an atheist reject
belief in God because he makes a totally rational choice? Not really. It is
more accurate, I believe, to say that we do not make a rational choice so much
as we try to rationalize the choice we have made. If I had been born in another
place or time my decision might have been different. Am I a Christian because
of my culture and my family? Certainly that has played a role in shaping my
beliefs. Would I be a Muslim had I been raised in the Middle East? Would I be
an atheist had I been raised in China? There is, of course, no way to know for
sure, and most people would protest that they would have made the same set of
choices about belief regardless of their place of origin, but I believe it is
certain that our choices and our thinking processes do not happen in a vacuum,
so let us put aside this irrational idea that we are always dealing in
rationality.
We all wear
glasses whose lenses are tinted by a particular perspective, and anyone who
denies this fact of human existence is either poorly informed or willfully
ignorant. It matters not how “rational” one purports to be; the reality is that
as human beings we have built-in biases, which are ingrained in us in ways we
do not always recognize or understand; and our supposed “rationality” can in no
way free us from those biases. All
we do, really, is change one set of lenses – or biases – for another. At least
that’s what I believe.
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